Now It Needs You
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Wikipedia is there when you need it — now it needs you. $1.4M USD $7.5M USD Donate Now [Hide] [Show] Wikipedia Forever Our shared knowledge. Our shared treasure. Help us protect it. [Show] Wikipedia Forever Our shared knowledge. Our shared treasure. Help us protect it. Honda From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search This article is about the multinational corporation. For other uses, see Honda (disambiguation). This article contains Japanese text. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of kanji and kana. Honda Motor Company, Ltd. Honda Giken Kogyo Kabushiki-gaisha 本田技研工業株式会社 Public Type (TYO: 7267) & (NYSE: HMC) Founded 24 September 1948 Soichiro Honda Founder(s) Takeo Fujisawa Headquarters Minato, Tokyo, Japan Area served Worldwide Satoshi Aoki (Chairman) Key people Takanobu Ito (CEO) Automobile Industry Truck manufacturer Motorcycle automobiles, trucks, motorcycles, scooters, ATVs, electrical generators, robotics, Products marine equipment, jets, jet engines, and lawn and garden equipment. Honda and Acura brands. Revenue ▲ US$ 120.27 Billion (FY 2009)[1] Operating ▲ US$ 2.34 Billion (FY 2009)[1] income Net income ▲ US$ 1.39 Billion (FY 2009)[1] Total assets ▼ US$ 124.98 Billion (FY 2009)[1] Total equity ▼ US$ 40.6 Billion (FY 2009)[1] Employees 181876[2] Website Honda.com Honda Motor Company, Ltd. (Japanese: 本田技研工業株式会社, Honda Giken Kōgyō Kabushiki- gaisha ?, Honda Technology Research Institute Company, Limited) listen (help·info) (TYO: 7267) is a Japanese multinational corporation primarily known as a manufacturer of automobiles and motorcycles. Honda was the first Japanese automobile manufacturer to release a dedicated luxury brand, Acura in 1986. Aside from their core automobile and motorcycle businesses, Honda also manufactures garden equipment, marine engines, personal watercraft and power generators, amongst others. Since 1986, Honda has been involved with artificial intelligence/robotics research and released their ASIMO robot in 2000. They have also ventured into aerospace with the establishment of GE Honda Aero Engines in 2004 and the Honda HA-420 HondaJet , scheduled to be released in 2011. Honda spends about 5% of its revenues into R&D.[3] Honda is the world's largest manufacturer of motorcycles as well as the world's largest manufacturer of internal combustion engines measured by volume, producing more than 14 million internal combustion engines each year.[4] Honda surpassed Nissan in 2001 to become the second-largest Japanese automobile manufacturer.[5][6] As of August 2008[update], Honda surpassed Chrysler as the fourth largest automobile manufacturer in the United States. Honda is the sixth largest automobile manufacturer in the world. Contents [hide] • 1 History • 2 Corporate Profile and Divisions • 3 Leadership • 4 Products ○ 4.1 Motorcycles ○ 4.2 Automobiles ○ 4.3 Mountain bikes ○ 4.4 Engines ○ 4.5 Robots ○ 4.6 Aeroplanes • 5 Motorsports ○ 5.1 Automobile ○ 5.2 Motorcycles • 6 Electric and alternative fuel vehicles ○ 6.1 Compressed natural gas ○ 6.2 Flexible-fuel ○ 6.3 Hybrid electric ○ 6.4 Hydrogen fuel cell • 7 Marketing • 8 Facilities (partial list) • 9 US Honda models • 10 Sales • 11 See also • 12 Notes • 13 References • 14 External links [edit] History This section requires expansion. From a young age (7), Soichiro Honda (本田 宗一郎, Honda Sōichirō) had a great interest in automobiles. He worked as a mechanic at a Japanese tuning shop, Art Shokai, where he tuned cars and entered them in races. A self-taught engineer, he later worked on a piston design which he hoped to sell to Toyota. The first drafts of his design were rejected, and Soichiro worked painstakingly to perfect the design, even going back to school and pawning his wife's jewelry for collateral. Eventually, he won a contract with Toyota and built a factory to construct pistons for them, which was destroyed in an earthquake. Due to a gas shortage during World War II, Honda was unable to use his car, and his novel idea of attaching a small engine to his bicycle attracted much curiosity. He then established the Honda Technical Research Institute in Hamamatsu, Japan, to develop and produce small 2-cycle motorbike engines. Calling upon 18,000 bicycle shop owners across Japan to take part in revitalizing a nation torn apart by war, Soichiro received enough capital to engineer his first motorcycle, the Honda Cub. This marked the beginning of Honda Motor Company, who would grow a short time later to be the world's largest manufacturer of motorcycles by 1964. The first production automobile from Honda was the T360 mini pick-up truck.[citation needed] Powered by a small 356 cc straight-4 gasoline engine, it was classified under the cheaper Kei car tax bracket.[citation needed] The first production car from Honda was the S500 sports car.[citation needed] Its chain driven rear wheels point to Honda's motorcycle origins.[citation needed] With high fuel prices and a weak US economy in June 2008, Honda reported a 1% sales increase while its rivals, including the Detroit Big Three and Toyota, have reported double-digit losses. Honda's sales were up almost 20 percent from the same month last year. The Civic and the Accord were in the top five list of sales.[7][8] Analysts have attributed this to two main factors. First, Honda's product lineup consists of mostly small to mid-size, highly fuel-efficient vehicles. Secondly, over the last ten years, Honda has designed its factories to be flexible, in that they can be easily retooled to produce any Honda model that may be in-demand at the moment. Nonetheless, Honda, Nissan, and Toyota, three of the strongest vehicle companies in the world, were still not immune to the global financial crisis of 2008, as these companies reduced their profitability forecasts. The economic crisis has been spreading to other important players in the vehicle related industries as well.[9][10] In November 2009 the Nihon Keizai Shinbun reported that Honda Motor exports have fallen 64.1%.[3] [edit] Corporate Profile and Divisions Honda headquarters building in Japan Honda is headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. Their shares trade on the Tokyo Stock Exchange and the New York Stock Exchange, as well as exchanges in Osaka, Nagoya, Sapporo, Kyoto, Fukuoka, London, Paris and Switzerland. American Honda Motor Co. is based in Torrance, California. Honda Canada Inc. is headquartered in the Scarborough district of Toronto, Ontario, and is building new corporate headquarters in Markham, Ontario, scheduled to relocate in 2008;[11] their manufacturing division, Honda of Canada Manufacturing, is based in Alliston , Ontario . Honda has also created joint ventures around the world, such as Honda Siel Cars and Hero Honda Motorcycles in India, [12] Guangzhou Honda and Dongfeng Honda in China, and Honda Atlas in Pakistan. At the 2008 Beijing Auto Show, Honda presented the Li Nian ("concept" or "idea") 5-door hatchback and announced that they were looking to developed an entry-level brand exclusively for the Chinese market similar to Toyota's Scion brand in the USA.[13] The brand would be developed by a 50-50 joint-venture established in 2007 with Guangzhou Automobile Industry Group.[14][15] [edit] Leadership • 1948–1973 — Soichiro Honda • 1973–1983 — Kiyoshi Kawashima • 1983–1990 — Tadashi Kume • 1990–1998 — Nobuhiko Kawamoto • 1998–2004 — Hiroyuki Yoshino • 2004–2009 — Takeo Fukui • since 2009 — Takanobu Ito [edit] Products [edit] Motorcycles For a list of motorcycle products, see List of Honda motorcycles. During the 1960s, when it was a small manufacturer, Honda broke out of the Japanese motorcycle market and began exporting to the US. Taking Honda’s story as an archetype of the smaller manufacturer entering a new market already occupied by highly dominant competitors, the story of their market entry, and their subsequent huge success in the US and around the world, has been the subject of some academic controversy. Competing explanations have been advanced to explain Honda’s strategy and the reasons for their success. The first of these explanations was put forward when, in 1975, Boston Consulting Group (BCG) was commissioned by the UK government to write a report explaining why and how the British motorcycle industry had been out-competed by its Japanese competitors. The report concluded that the Japanese firms, including Honda, had sought a very high scale of production (they had made a large number of motorbikes) in order to benefit from economies of scale and learning curve effects. It blamed the decline of the British motorcycle industry on the failure of British managers to invest enough in their businesses to profit from economies of scale and scope. 2004 Honda Super Cub The second explanation was offered in 1984 by Richard Pascale , who had interviewed the Honda executives responsible for the firm’s entry into the US market. As opposed to the tightly focused strategy of low cost and high scale that BCG accredited to Honda, Pascale found that their entry into the US market was a story of “miscalculation, serendipity, and organizational learning” – in other words, Honda’s success was due to the adaptability and hard work of its staff, rather than any long term strategy. For example, Honda’s initial plan on entering the US was to compete in large motorcycles, around 300 cc. It was only when the team found that the scooters they were using to get themselves around their US base of San Francisco attracted positive interest from consumers that they came up with the idea of selling the Supercub. The most recent school of thought on Honda’s strategy was put forward by Gary Hamel and C. K. Prahalad in 1989. Creating the concept of core competencies with Honda as an example, they argued that Honda’s success was due to its focus on leadership in the technology of internal combustion engines.